The Backward Glance - Former Steel Worker Played Part in Early Encinitas Entertainment

The "everything," she said, often included cleaning the alley's
10 lanes around midnight, when the air would be a soft blue from
cigarette smoke, and locking the day's takings in the safe.

"It was an eerie building at night if you were there alone," she
said. "I was always hearing strange noises -- unaccountable creaks
and groans."

One midnight Irene put a cigar box holding money and membership
cards from her own bowling team, the women's major league, on her
car's roof while she unlocked the car's door.

"I forgot it, and drove off," she said. "Money and cards
scattered along the coast highway."

It was the late '60s, and the new freeway meant there was almost
no traffic on 101. The next morning Irene got up at dawn and walked
back along the highway, all the way to the bowling alley from her
home on Sunset, scooping up cards, quarters, dimes and dollars. "I
found it all," she said.

By the early '70s the feisty former steel worker was slowing
down. His youngest son Glenn "Bud" Hare and his wife, Lael, bought
the alley, and renamed it DynaBowl.

"When it first opened it was such an exciting place, always
packed. It was right after the war, and there really wasn't much
else to do in Encinitas," remembers Lael, who bowled there as a
teen-ager. "But by the '70s there were lots of other
attractions."

Glenn Hare, who'd invented the Hare Traction Splint for accident
victims when he was on the San Diego Police force, was also busy
building a business -- DynaMed -- based on the splint. In the mid
'70s the Hares sold the building.

Since then there've been numerous businesses housed in the old
bowling alley. One reader told me that a topless go-go bar once
flourished there. Perhaps he thought I was a rather strait-laced
sort of columnist because he added, hastily, "Of course I never
went there myself!"